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Recordings

'Easily takes first place within the exiguous competition' (Fanfare, USA)'This is quite glorious … one senses right from the opening of Bruckner's Quintet—surely one of the finest quintets ever written, for any combina ...» More

'[Piano Quartet] An enjoyable piece … expansively dramatic and genuinely expressive with that touch of spontaneity which signals Strauss at his b ...'Reducing the string size of Strauss's Metamorphosen from 23 to the seven of the composer's short score … might seem to be going light on ...» More

Details

The string sextet which opens Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, composed in 1940–41, might almost have been a sketch for Metamorphosen. No other opera begins quite like this. What we hear is the work (it was originally to have been a quartet) which one of the characters, the composer Flamand, has written for the young widowed Countess Madeleine for whose love he is a rival with the poet Olivier. Its ingratiating opening phrases flow seamlessly together, setting the intimate mood of this ‘conversation piece’, as Strauss described this opera. This exposition comes to a full close and the sextet could have ended there. But after a pause a new fantasia-like section begins with dramatic tremolandi and exciting florid passages for solo violin and solo viola. This is where the music acquires the elegiac mood which takes it nearly into the orbit of Metamorphosen. The themes are spun out and woven together with supreme artistry. This section comes to resolution on a chord and the recapitulation follows in the tonic key.

Capriccio was first performed in Munich on 28 October 1942 but the sextet had its premiere several months earlier in Vienna at a private gathering in the house of the city’s Nazi Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach. This gesture was made by Strauss (who had known Schirach’s composer-father) in gratitude for the protection afforded by Schirach to Strauss’s son and part-Jewish wife, although they were in fact arrested on one occasion. It was Schirach’s ambition to restore Vienna as cultural centre of Europe and collaboration in this aim was a small price for Strauss to pay in return for the safety of his beloved family. Hence the somewhat strange launch of this exquisite piece of music.

Richard Strauss’s last stage work is something of a curiosity. It has no action, no development, almost no plot, and none of the intricate characterization of the earlier operas. Capriccio is described as a ‘conversation piece for music in one act’. It was something of a self-indulgence for the ageing Strauss—a long consideration of the relative merit of words and music, a subject to which composers since Monteverdi had given much time and thought. Capriccio was written during 1940/41, to a libretto by Strauss’s friend the conductor Clemens Krauss, and first performed in Munich in October 1942, though the Sextet had been given privately some months before.

Strauss devises a play-within-a-play and sets the opera in a pre-Revolution French château. At the start, the Sextet is heard off-stage: it opens a concert devised by the composer Flamand for the birthday of the Countess Madeleine. Flamand and the poet Olivier respectively personify music and poetry; both seek the approval and love of the Countess and both watch for her reaction to this pure music.

As an independent piece, the Sextet is a welcome supplement to the meagre string sextet repertoire; by using two violins, two violas and two cellos Strauss acknowledges the Sextets of Brahms, whose chamber music he had loved since his student days. The thematic material of this prelude is later recalled in an orchestral interlude before the final scene, and again as the countess confronts her own reflection in a mirror and concludes that there is no answer to her questions and musings, and that words and music have equal merit.